Internet Intimacy: Authenticity and Longing in the Relationships of Millennial Young Adults

In this paper, I use interviews with forty-two millennial young adults in the United States to explore their understandings of the role of digital media technologies in their relationship lives. Despite coming of age in an increasingly digitized society, these young adults have a complicated view of using digital technologies to forge and sustain their relationships. They contrast the pitfalls of their own digitally mediated relationships with those relationships that are created and sustained without the influence of digital technologies. They assume the latter to be more organic, natural, less prone to trouble, and authentic, and often characterize the influence of digital technologies as impeding their ability to find good relationships. However, while projecting their relationship worries onto digital technologies helps young adults resolve their larger anxieties about intimate relationships, it may also have unintended consequences for how young adults think about social relationships and technological progress more broadly